Advice for the MacArthur Genius Grants

I had heard of the MacArthur Foundation and its Fellows Program, where they give grants of $500,000 (turns out it has gone up to $625,000) to people who are doing work that they want to encourage.  A bit of reading on the matter yielded the dismaying impression that, to a considerable extent, the Program functions as just another liberal self-congratulatory scheme, awarded disproportionately to professors at places like Harvard and Berkeley.

In other words, I grew concerned at the prospect that many of these awards might be serving merely to burnish the résumés and supplement the wealth of elite northerners who were already pretty well-positioned to pursue their talents and their visions.  Maybe I had been overly idealistic about the MacArthur Foundation  in general, and about this program in particular.  But it seemed appropriate to offer a suggestion that might eventually facilitate some improvement; hence this email on…